Hardy's allusions and the problem of 'pedantry'

Abstract

In this article I take up a question which has been much discussed in literary criticism, the question of Hardy's 'pedantry' of style. Using Far from the Madding Crowd, I focus on two elements of 'pedantry', Hardy's generics and his allusions to paintings and other objects of 'high culture'. Following and elaborating on Fowler (1981), I analyse Hardy's generics in contrast with George Eliot's, and I extend Fowler's principles to include analysis of specific allusions, seeing these as essentially metaphors and using the terminology of Leech (1969). In a final discussion, I locate Victorian criticism of Hardy's 'pedantry' in the context of anxieties about different senses of 'culture' in the 1870s and after, and suggest that Hardy's 'pedantry' derives from his sense of cultural pluralism, which was unacceptable to conservative contemporaries.